Tubelight: Wrongly Titled, Should Have Been Named “Yakeen”

The movie opened at a lighter note for me for some other reasons right since the customary claim was shown on the screen, “No animals were injured or harmed during the shoot of this film.” And I was like, “Yeah, right! those who were meant to be killed have already been killed.” And the movie started which is just another chain in the series of Salman Khan’s revolution of throwing a subtle valuable lesson related to reforming our nation and benefiting humanity. As I was mentally gathering my take-home notes, for the first 30-40 minutes, my thoughts were concentrated only at, “Why are these two middle aged men pretending to be young chaps.”

The 3 hour long movie is all about delivering a very simple lesson of life that “Faith in yourself and your deeds is everything and can do anything.” You can deduce a lot other quotes too such as, “Your firm belief in yourself can even tremble a rock.” In a row, to be precise, Salman Khan has played the role of a ‘simpler-than-an-ant-man’. In the movie, he lacks the general intelligence and is extremely innocent and slow in processing things. Another conclusion we are about to make, that is why he is always teased with the name ‘tubelight’ and movie gets its name.

Although not so very famous legend of the time when Indian & China were at war, we all had an idea that the protagonist goes an extra mile for the love of his brother and does everything to bring him back to homeland as he got captured by the army of the enemies. But in actuality, Laxman (Salman Khan) does nothing unbelievable or exemplary but maintains a firm belief throughout that his brother will come back one day no matter what. This power of belief he gets from a fatherly figure Banne Chacha (Om Puri) who loves the duo like his own sons since they lost their parents at young age and are without any elders at home.

The story keeps unfolding to tell how Laxman continues to have belief and follow Mahatma Gandhi’s principles. And one day, to everyone’s surprise the brother who was declared dead returns after war scenes die down. There is a garnishing of a Chinese family whose ancestors had migrated to India many decades ago, but they never stopped questions on their nationality for their looks and physical appearance. To avoid suspecting eyes of the world, they shift to a small hillside village as of Laxman. And they and Laxman have sweet and warm relationship of friendship in-between.

This is all about the story and direction, I couldn’t get the exact motive of the film other than learning a prominent life lesson of always having belief in myself and getting over all my fears because fear is our biggest enemy. The only thing that comforted me was the sneak into the beautiful hills of northern India and serene life of the habitats of a small town nestled against the hillside. Otherwise, it is just a flat movie with no strong subject!